Count on Michael Joyce to reinvent the genre of the picaresque novel in a mode suited to the 21st century! With a light touch and sure sense of prose rhythm, he introduces a leitmotif of randomly appearing doorways, thresholds into and out of the world, to puncture the narrative space of this engaging novel. Scenes appear within scenes as the tales unfold in true keeping with the genre that recounts a hero’s progress. The sequence of events is made to make sense by sheer deftness of Joyce’s skill as a narrator and his willingness to use the unexpected as a structuring device, as well as an excuse to delight. Making sense of the past through the telling of his tales, Joyce offers his readers a fresh experience of a classic form filled with contemporary references. — Johanna Drucker

Remedia: A Picaresque

Literature & Fiction

Joyce, Michael

Literary

Steerage Press

A work of highly unconventional literary fiction, Big Man with a Shovel is a modern-day fable in which a powerful laborer befriends a young worker only to find himself pitted against a tyrannical foreman. Set in Upstate New York in 1965, this coming-of-age drama mixes folklore, myth, and metafiction in a story that is by turns playful, suspenseful, and mysterious. Available in paperback and Kindle editions.

Big Man with a Shovel

Amato, Joe

United States

Originally conceived as three discrete books, Common Time takes pianist Glenn Gould’s notion of the two-take as its procedural centerpiece, soldering together sections from each of the three finished versions and combining them to make one final work. But unlike Gould’s idea of an authoritative masterwork built from multiple versions of an original piece, Chris Pusateri turns the telescope backwards, making of this brokenness a meditation on what it means to compose, to couple, to comprehend.

Common Time

Pusateri, Chris

Poetry

Disappearance enmeshes us in nested networks from which it is impossible to escape unchanged. The novel spins up an elegant series of labyrinthine, mirror-rimmed puzzles that seem intended not so much for solution as habitation – propositions that bring into alarming clarity the strangeness of domains we so casually inhabit: memory, imagination, time. Arriving in a restless tidal flow of casually virtuosic language, the novel’s many mysteries twirl, invert, and disgorge more mysteries. As in other Joyce stories we could mention, we may have seen someone die this morning, or in the not too distant future, or at some point as yet unfixed in the viscous fore-and-backwardness of disappearing time. The narrator may be the victim, or perhaps a cybernetic detective who assumes the dead man’s memories, a version of everyone’s maze-trapped prisoner. Wayfarer, philosoph, this man may lie in the grip of dementia, or dystopian oppression, or a video game from the future – names, no doubt, for a common disorder. This is a seriously playful book, hip to all the slippery ontologies of protean path-work, evocative both of old-school games (Mindwheel, Myst) and more recent philosophical entertainments (Passage, Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable). Fans of far-sighted fiction will find parallels with Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Burroughs, Hawkes, and the newer world-games of Mark Danielewski, Steve Erickson, and Jeff Noon. Followers of the graphic novel may find sublimely paranoid resonance with visions like Warren Ellis’s Planetary or Grant Morrison’s Filth. In life as not in fiction, however, there is only ever one Michael Joyce, and Disappearance demonstrates that he is not simply a master of fictional craft, but of fiction itself, in its most vital and changing form. Joyce is a genuinely transformational artist capable not simply of imagining other worlds, but of extending the range of imagination itself. This is a book that may change not just the way you see fiction, but indeed the way you see. – Stuart Moulthrop

Disappearance

Contemporary

In A Brand New Beggar, poetry has the walking blues. A. L. Nielsen again pursues what Oliver Nelson called "the blues and the abstract truth," parsing the sundry moods of blues travelers, whether in flight or riding the rails. These lines dig deep in the American grain to remind us of who we are, and who we might be.

A Brand New Beggar

Nielsen, A.L.

An anthology of writing from 82 contributors across the US, both established writers and relative newcomers, Litscapes includes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and work that defies genre. The result is a bracing view of today's vital literary landscape.

Litscapes: Collected US Writings 2015

Authors, Selected

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